Politico

When President Joe Biden and aides teased that a new tranche of sanctions against Russia would be announced Friday, the implication was that it was partly in response to the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In reality, the package has long been in the works, timed to mark the two-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, according to three officials familiar with the process. On Wednesday, there were still discussions on whether more sanctions could be added, but it appeared that expanding the package could not easily be done in a matter of days, according to one of the officials. All three were granted anonymity to speak publicly about private deliberations.

Biden, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a 2021 summit, had promised “devastating” consequences for Russia if the imprisoned opposition leader were to die. But nearly three years later, the Biden administration is increasingly aware it has few satisfying, quick options to punish Moscow for Navalny’s death.

Biden squarely blamed Putin for Navalny’s demise. On Tuesday, he promised that a package of “major sanctions” against Moscow would be unveiled at the end of this week.

The administration is considering three main options, two economic and one military, according to the three officials. The U.S. could add more sanctions on Russia as well as shut down the ways Moscow evades current penalties — for example, by stopping sensitive technologies from powering key parts of Russian industry. Both methods would further hurt the Kremlin’s ability to wage the war in Ukraine.

The other idea is to pump Ukraine full of more advanced weaponry, turning Kyiv’s forces into a more powerful entity that Russia would struggle to defeat.

There are also more aggressive and complicated moves under consideration, the three officials said. The U.S. could curb Russia’s oil exports — including to America’s friends like India and adversaries like China — and seize frozen Russian assets to eventually rebuild Ukraine. Those were unlikely to be part of the most imminent moves, the officials said.

But it was unclear if any of those penalties imposed on Putin’s regime would reach the bar Biden promised at the 2021 summit in Geneva, mainly because the U.S. had largely exhausted its toolkit of penalties after Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago this week.

“We’ve got so many in place, it’d be hard to find some, but we’ll ratchet them up — and should,” Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. But Risch acknowledged that there wasn’t much more pressure the U.S. could impose.

The White House’s larger focus remains pushing House Republicans to advance a $95 billion Senate-approved supplemental funding measure that includes additional military aid for Ukraine, according to the three officials.

Further delays, the administration has argued, will only continue to weaken Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. After retaking some of the territory Russia initially seized after its invasion two years ago, the conflict has bogged down over the past 12 months. Ukraine is in strong defensive positions across the country’s eastern flank, but as arms supplies dwindle, Russia is gaining ground.

Ukraine’s withdrawal Saturday from the city of Avdiivka brought the growing precariousness of the situation into starker relief. And recent declarations by former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential frontrunner who urged Russia to expand its invasion into any NATO country that didn’t spend enough on its defenses, has only rattled Kyiv further.

“Ukraine really never succeeded in significantly punching through the miles of defensive fortifications — tank traps, minefields — that the Russians had time to build up. And as a consequence, even if Russia can stay the course, I don’t think Ukraine can,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Inside the administration, however, some disagree with the view that time is on Putin’s side. Although cracks in the West’s resolve to back Ukraine could weaken Ukraine over time, the significant impact of economic sanctions on Russia’s economy also has the potential to ensure Moscow pays a greater price the longer the conflict drags on.

In the coming weeks, House Republicans may consider a separate package from the bill that cleared the Senate last week. The initial proposal from Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) may include less defense aid for Ukraine and does not include economic or humanitarian funds. That’s a frustration for the administration, but Biden is likely to sign whatever Ukraine aid legislation makes it to his desk, according to two of the three officials.

Russia has successfully evaded existing U.S. sanctions and gained military strength by buying weapons — including those used in the Ukraine war — from Iran and North Korea. Despite recent reporting indicating 400 surface-to-surface missiles had arrived in Russia from Iran, one of the U.S. officials said the administration had seen no clear evidence of such a transfer.

There is appetite in Congress, including from Biden’s own party, to hit Russia harder.

“The provocation of the death of Navalny, it’s a very strong view that this creates an opportunity and a justification to do more,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in an interview at Munich, “whether that is trying to impede more effectively the Russian oil exports, or be more aggressive with the sanctions and seizures, or provide, particular munitions that can do particular missions and disrupt Russian expectations about what’s safe in Crimea and near Crimea.”

The Biden administration is already leaning toward providing long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems that travel further than the older version the U.S. already shipped to Ukraine. That would reverse Biden’s position that sending the weapon would escalate the war and tempt officials in Kyiv to target deep into sovereign Russian territory. The administration has hinted to lawmakers that this type of ATACMS, which pro-Kyiv Republicans have long wanted in Ukrainian hands, would feature in the first tranche of military aid after $60 billion in support is authorized by Congress.

Democrats and Republicans are also nudging the U.S. to seize approximately $300 billion in Russian funds around the world and use them toward rebuilding Ukraine. The REPO Act, backed by Risch and Whitehouse, would greenlight such a move.

But the process is legally tricky and most of Russia’s assets are in Europe. Many European nations fear the slippery-slope aspect of taking items from another nation over a policy disagreement. But they say passing the bill would signal to European allies and partners in the G7 to take the idea seriously, potentially kickstarting serious negotiations on how to pursue the repossession and transfer policy.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan, in previewing the U.S. response, said it would build on existing penalties and be “another turn of the crank” to increase pressure on Moscow.

“It will be a substantial package covering a range of different elements of the Russian defense industrial base,” Sullivan said Tuesday, “and sources of revenue for the Russian economy that power Russia’s war machine, that power Russia’s aggression and that power Russia’s repression. So we believe it will have an impact.”

The U.S. has already sanctioned scores of senior Russian officials, oligarchs, military entities, defense firms and other companies that contributed to Putin’s invasion. After Russian tanks stormed into Ukraine two years ago, Europe imposed sanctions on Russia at a far faster clip than even the U.S. expected.

The U.S. ran through its list of reprimands, which had been prepared over months, after just a week, causing U.S. officials to scramble for more ways to hurt Russia and keep pace with allies across the Atlantic.

As frustrations over the congressional funding delay mount, administration officials looked to underscore the importance of the aid that’s already been sent, pushing back on the suggestion from some Republicans that the money the U.S. and allies have contributed to Ukraine’s defense has been wasted because the war has been at a stalemate for so long.

Not only has Russia’s military and economy borne the brunt of a lengthy conflict the Kremlin failed to anticipate, Ukraine’s military has succeeded in expelling Russia’s navy from the Black Sea, destroying numerous Russian vessels with drones and underwater strikes and ensuring that grain exports continue to flow, lessening the impact on trade and global food supplies.

Additionally, officials have begun to attack GOP claims that U.S. aid amounts to transferring money to Kyiv, noting that, in reality, the legislation allows the Pentagon to transfer existing weapons to Ukraine and to use the new funding to replenish stockpiles, an economic boon for American manufacturers in dozens of states.

The Biden administration is considering a string of new executive actions and federal regulations in an effort to curb migration at the U.S. southern border, according to three people familiar with the plans.

The proposals under consideration would represent a sweeping new approach to an issue that has stymied the White House since its first days in office and could potentially place the president at odds with key constituencies.

Among the ideas under discussion include using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from seeking asylum in between U.S. ports of entry. The administration is also discussing tying that directive to a trigger — meaning that it would only come into effect after a certain number of illegal crossings took place, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

A trigger mechanism was part of a bipartisan Senate border deal that never reached the floor earlier this month. During the deal’s construction, President Joe Biden repeatedly said it would have given him the authority to “shut down” the border.

The administration is also discussing ways to make it harder for migrants to pass the initial screening for asylum seekers, essentially raising the “credible fear standard,” as well as ways to quickly deport others who don’t meet those elevated asylum standards. Two of the people said the policy announcements could come as soon as next week ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on March 7.

The slate of policies could allow the administration officials to fill some of the void left after congressional Republicans killed a bipartisan border deal in the Senate. But it would also open up the administration to criticism that it always had the tools at its disposal to more fully address the migrant crisis but waited to use them.

No final decisions have been made about what executive actions, if any, could be taken, an administration official said, speaking about internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. Administrations often explore a number of options, the official said, though it doesn’t necessarily mean the policies will come to fruition.

The consideration of new executive action comes as the White House tries to turn the border deal failure into a political advantage for the president. It also comes amid growing concern among Democrats that the southern border presents a profound election liability for the party. Officials hope that policy announcements will drive down numbers of migrants coming to the border and demonstrate to voters that they’re exhausting all options to try to solve the problem as peak migration season quickly approaches.

“The Administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” said White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández.

“No executive action, no matter how aggressive, can deliver the significant policy reforms and additional resources Congress can provide and that Republicans rejected,” he continued.

The three people familiar with the planning cautioned that the details of proposed actions remain murky and that the impact of the policies — particularly the asylum ban — is also dependent on the specific language of the federal regulation, they said. For example, the Senate bill included exceptions for unaccompanied minors and people who meet the requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture rules.

There are other complications as well. The implementation of any action from the White House would come without the funding and resources that could make implementation easier, though the administration is looking into ways to unlock additional funding. The actions would likely face legal challenges as well.

The Trump administration repeatedly used Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to aggressively shape the immigration system. In late 2018, President Donald Trump signed a policy that temporarily barred migrants who tried to illegally cross into the U.S. outside of official ports of entry. It was quickly blocked by a federal judge in California. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the decision, which was then upheld by the Supreme Court.

The policies, once announced, will likely be met with steep backlash from immigration advocates who will claim the president is once again walking back on his campaign promises to rebuild a humane immigration system and protect the right to asylum.

President Joe Biden narrowly leads former president Donald Trump even though an overwhelming majority of voters are worried about his age, a new Quinnipiac University poll showed.

The poll, conducted from Feb. 15 to Feb. 19, found that 49 percent of registered voters support Biden and 45 percent back Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup.

However, 67 percent of voters said the 81-year-old president is too old to effectively serve another term — compared with 57 percent who said the same of Trump, who is 77. Only 34 percent said Biden had the mental fitness to serve a second term, while 48 percent believed Trump is mentally fit.

Age has become an increasingly prominent issue in both the GOP and Democratic presidential primaries. Trump’s primary opponent, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, has taken swipes at both men over their age and Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips launched his challenge to Biden largely over his concerns that Biden’s age rendered him unfit to run — and win — against the former president.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s recent report on the president’s handling of classified documents — which found that criminal charges were not warranted, unlike in Trump’s own classified documents case — called Biden a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Both Trump and Biden have pushed back against concerns about their age and fitness. Biden has forcefully denied questions about his age, including in a contentious press conference defending his memory in the wake of Hur’s report. Trump responded to Haley’s attacks by touting his cognitive skills, saying he felt “about 35 years old.”

The survey also showed that voters largely support sending additional military aid to Ukraine, even as it has stalled in Congress. Among respondents, 56 percent were in favor and 44 percent were against more aid.

Voters were divided on providing further military aid to Israel in the war with Hamas, and overall slightly opposed it, 48 percent to 44 percent. The matter of sending aid to the U.S. ally has grown increasingly contentious as some lawmakers have raised humanitarian concerns about the effects of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

The poll surveyed 1,421 registered voters nationwide and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

The White House ratcheted up its onslaught on House Republican leadership, criticizing them for going on “vacation” without approving funding for Ukraine.

“The damage House Republicans are actively causing to American national security mounts every day that they insist on continuing their two-week vacation,” spokesperson Andrew Bates wrote in a memo to be released Wednesday and first obtained by POLITICO.

The memo includes a “vacation reading packet” of potential threats if the funding is not approved, including Russia advancing on the Ukrainian battle line and a decline in American defense manufacturing.

Since the Senate approved a $95 billion national defense supplemental, the White House has been hammering House Republicans to simply take up the bill and approve it. But Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team called the bill “dead on arrival” in their chamber and said they wouldn’t bring it to a vote.

“No amount of memos from the White House can change the fact that House Republicans were clear from the very beginning: any national security supplemental should start at our own border,” Johnson spokesperson Taylor Haulsee said Wednesday. “Stunningly, after four months of negotiations which the House was not party to, the White House-Senate bill is entirely silent on the border — the top issue for most Americans.”

The House, he added, “will work its own will on the matter.”

The House left Thursday and is due to return in a week.

Shortly after the chamber recessed without taking up the supplemental bill, news broke about the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Democrats argue his death in a Russian prison increases the urgency on Republicans to pass funding to help Ukraine continue to fend off Russia.

Johnson has repeatedly asked President Joe Biden for a meeting, but those requests have gone unheeded.

That leaves the White House with few options besides building political pressure on Republicans to take up the bill.

“Speaker Johnson has shown no signs of cancelling Republicans’ vacation as he puts his own internal politics over the safety of the American people,” Bates continued, adding that the refusal to take up the bill undermines Ukraine’s defenses, endangers NATO and denies military assistance to Israel.

It’s not unusual for politicians to get criticized for going on “vacation” when they’re away from Washington. The Biden administration’s critique is not without risks; Republicans have frequently gone after Biden for his frequent weekend visits to his Delaware beach home and vacations.

The New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said Monday that the White House is “extremely upset” about its coverage on President Joe Biden’s age but the newspaper will “continue to report fully and fairly.”

“We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden,” Sulzberger said in an interview with The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

“He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.”

Criticism over coverage of Biden’s low approval ratings and, more especially, Biden’s age has sparked disapproval both from the Biden campaign and some members of the press. News stories of Biden’s age gained even more traction among the press as special counsel Robert Hur wrote in his recent report, entirely without prompting, that Biden was “an elderly man with a poor memory.”

Last week, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said she found the coverage of this news, specifically in her old Times haunt, completely overcooked.

Sullivan wrote that she wishes that Sulzberger would instruct his opinion editor and the top news editor to cease “going overboard with both coverage and commentary about Biden’s age” and “tone it down.”

“We are not saying that this is the same as Trump’s five court cases or that they are even,” Sulzberger said in the interview. “They are different. But they are both true, and the public needs to know both those things. And if you are hyping up one side or downplaying the other, no side has a reason to trust you in the long run.”

President Joe Biden called the behavior of House Republicans “shocking” on Monday for “walking away from the threat of Russia” for not passing aid for Ukraine.

“The way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from meeting our obligations. It’s just shocking. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Biden said in remarks to reporters on the White House lawn.

Biden’s frustrations with House Republicans have increased after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died Friday in prison.

The president urged House Republicans to pass aid for Ukraine on Friday, saying, “It’s about time they step up, don’t you think,” instead of going on an extended recess, which he called a “two-week vacation.”

When asked by reporters Monday if Navalny’s death will make a difference for Republicans in passing an aid package, Biden said, “I hope so, but I’m not sure.”

Last week, the Senate passed a $95 billion bipartisan aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. House Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far resisted taking up the measure that would provide billions in aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Moscow.

Biden said Monday that he would “be happy to meet with [Johnson] if he has anything to say.”

Alejandro Mayorkas may now hold the distinction as the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached since 1876. But in the days since that House vote, the Homeland Security secretary has acted as if nothing ever happened.

That’s by design.

The White House is hoping to demonstrate that it is business as usual at DHS, eager to show that the president’s team is unfazed by the impeachment and to portray Republicans as consumed by partisan vendettas at the cost of tending to the crisis at the southern border.

Since Tuesday’s House vote, Mayorkas has been preparing for his trip to Germany for the Munich Security Conference. He delivered keynote remarks on Friday, and through the weekend, he’ll participate in several panel discussions and hold a series of bilateral meetings on a range of national security issues. On Sunday, he’ll head to Vienna, Austria, to meet with China’s state councilor and minister of public health to discuss the country’s work to combat the flow of fentanyl. Mayorkas has not yet addressed questions about the successful vote.

Administration officials aren’t disengaged from the impeachment fight. President Joe Biden slammed the impeachment as “petty partisan games.” And aides are monitoring it closely, often elevating Republicans who have questioned the merits of impeachment.

But the administration is also leaning on allied outside groups to poke holes in the GOP’s case against Mayorkas and echo the message coming from Pennsylvania Avenue. They believe the Mayorkas impeachment — and his public nonchalance about it — will help further the narrative carrying over from the bipartisan Senate border deal battle: that Republicans are not invested in solving the crisis at the border so much as perpetuating it as a political cudgel.

“House Republicans will be remembered by history for trampling on the Constitution for political gain rather than working to solve the serious challenges at our border. While Secretary Mayorkas was helping a group of Republican and Democratic Senators develop bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security and get needed resources for enforcement, House Republicans have wasted months with this baseless, unconstitutional impeachment,” said DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg in response to Tuesday’s impeachment vote.

There are risks to the approach. The White House has been underwater on the issue of immigration and migration virtually since the moment Biden took office. And while no one sees a Senate trial for Mayorkas ending in conviction, it will allow Republicans in that chamber the chance to place a bright spotlight on the inability of the Biden administration to stem the tide of migrants. Mayorkas’ tenure will come under intense scrutiny, in ways it has not to this point.

But Democrats and Biden allies believe the political tide is changing. They view Tom Suozzi’s victory in New York, where the Democrat leaned into immigration and went on offense against Republicans, as further evidence that their new messaging strategy around GOP indifference to the problem is already working. A Mayorkas impeachment, they believe, could be used in the same way.

“Voters are watching as the House GOP chaos conference puts Trump’s political wishes ahead of real solutions to improve border security,” said DNC rapid response director Alex Floyd, noting Dems’ victory in the New York special election. “Trump and his MAGA minions can take a break from their clown show, but they will pay the price this November for putting Trump first and the American people last.”

For a White House that has repeatedly struggled to nail a consistent message on immigration, the administration in recent weeks has delivered forceful attacks against House Republicans. As the venue soon shifts to an impeachment trial, the White House has been largely content to back channel with allied outside groups engaged in the fight.

The Congressional Integrity Project has led the charge externally. The group launched in late 2022 — ahead of Republicans taking over the House — with the goal of combatting the investigative onslaught into the Biden administration. The organization has been tracking the targeting of Mayorkas closely, but as impeachment seemed increasingly likely, it ramped up that element of its operations.

Over the last six weeks, the Congressional Integrity Project has worked closely with advocates in the immigration policy space to defend Mayorkas and to paint the GOP effort as a “shameful” and unfounded partisan act tied to fringe conservatives, such as Georgia Rep. Majorie Taylor Green and Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs.

The groups, including America’s Voice and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, have stayed in touch over a shared chat where they coordinate strategy, said Douglas Rivlin, communications director at America’s Voice. They have pushed various constituencies to speak out against the impeachment effort they’ve sought to frame as “unconstitutional.”

They’ve elevated criticism from Cuban American leaders, as well as former DHS secretaries like Michael Chertoff and conservative legal scholars such as Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz, former President Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyer.

The House Homeland Security Committee, which filed the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, did not respond to a request for comment. On the day of the vote, Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said Congress took “decisive action to defend our constitution order and hold accountable a public official who has violated his oath of office,” urging the Senate to remove Mayorkas from office.

Among some of the most aggressive counter-attacks amplified by the groups came from Jewish leaders who argued that the impeachment of Mayorkas, who is also Jewish, carries antisemitic undertones. The leaders blasted “extreme” members of the GOP caucus who have used “anti-immigrant, conspiracy-driven” rhetoric, warning that mass shooters in El Paso, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Poway, California, echoed words such as “replacement” and “invasion.”

Because of the timing of the Republican impeachment — occurring as the border deal collapsed — it was easy for the groups to coalesce around a unified message, Rivlin said, including immigration advocates, who have often clashed with the Biden administration over its border policy.

“There are lots of policies that we don’t like — that Biden and Mayorkas have been engaged in,” Rivlin said. “But at the same time, Republicans were showing so many of their cards that illustrated the points that we’ve been making about them. They’re not interested in making policy. They’re interested in dividing people.”

The White House office tasked with helping the nation manage a debilitating opioid epidemic has been beset by significant staff turnover and large-scale discontent with its director, Dr. Rahul Gupta, according to nine people familiar with its operations.

Seven former and current officials, as well two other people with knowledge of the office dynamics, described the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy as a “toxic” work environment. And they put the blame for that on Gupta, who they described as egocentric and a “prima donna” preoccupied with his public profile.

At least eight top officials and a number of other aides have resigned in recent months in large part because of Gupta’s leadership, according to the same officials. The departures have created a significant leadership vacuum in the office of roughly 75 people, leading to dysfunction across the team that has caused important deadlines to be missed, the people familiar with the office’s operations said.

“When everybody leaves, it can’t be ‘everybody is the problem,’” said one of the former officials who, like the others, was granted anonymity to speak candidly and without fear of retribution. “On some level, you might be the problem.”

An ONDCP official, in response to a request for comment, said the office’s “critical mission to address the overdose epidemic is deeply personal to Dr. Gupta: from his decades of work as a physician treating patients with substance use disorder, to leading the public health response efforts in ground zero of the opioid crisis in West Virginia.”

“Dr. Gupta remains laser-focused on the office’s work to strengthen life-saving public health services, prevent illicit drugs from reaching our communities, and meeting with Americans across the country to strengthen our whole-of-society response,” the official said.

Gupta, a practicing physician of more than 25 years, most recently served as the chief medical and health officer, interim chief science officer and senior vice president at the nonprofit March of Dimes before being appointed by President Joe Biden to his current post in 2021. He also served under two West Virginia governors as the state’s health commissioner and was a professor of medicine at several universities.

The White House praised Gupta’s nomination in 2021 as a “historic step in the Administration’s efforts to turn the tide of our nation’s addiction and overdose epidemic.” It noted his background as a physician made him uniquely qualified to oversee an office tasked with preventing drug overdoses through expanding access to prevention and recovery support services, as well reducing the supply of illicit drugs.

But the seven current and former officials told POLITICO that Gupta has not lived up to that billing. They say he put unrealistic pressure on his small team to raise his public profile, such as becoming frustrated when staff were unable to land meetings with a high-ranking official during his travels. In the public-facing role, Gupta travels domestically and abroad frequently, and staff often felt he had unrealistic demands about his travel accommodations.

The trips, the former and current officials said, often centered around Gupta rather than the work ONDCP was doing. He expected Cabinet-level treatment when traveling and would blow up plans when staff couldn’t deliver. He canceled one trip last year, after months of planning, because he didn’t want to fly Southwest Airlines, the officials said. He also once calculated the square-footage of a hotel room, and then requested staff book him a larger room. And he liked to roll up to events — including weekend embassy parties — in a black government SUV with staff, even though that sort of service is not typically used by ONDCP directors for events unrelated to the office’s direct work.

The current and former staffers said they believe his approach to the job is directly at odds with the president’s early insistence that he would not tolerate demeaning behavior by his team.

“The way he’s been treating people is like, completely the opposite of what Biden said he expects from his staff,” said a person with direct knowledge of the office dynamic. “I think everybody is afraid because they’re afraid of retribution.”

The current and former officials believe that Gupta has been harmed by not taking time to build key relationships with the White House, particularly with the Domestic Policy Council which coordinates the president’s domestic agenda and advises the president on policy. Staff say they fear that their issue was falling to the wayside as the West Wing juggles a number of weighty priorities.

“I think he likes the perks of the job. I think he likes the title, the ability to travel,” the first former official said. “But I don’t know that he likes the work that’s required to make it a very relevant place.”

As part of the Biden administration’s commitment to diversity in backgrounds, the White House has emphasized the importance of appointing people in recovery from substance use disorders to ONDCP. But some of those appointees said they felt like Gupta rarely listened to their input and at times felt like he stigmatized people in recovery.

“The director makes the culture and it was not supportive of my recovery,” said a second former official.

The tension flowing through the office has been a major distraction, the current and former officials said. Perhaps most frustrating, they said, is that internal dysfunction has taken attention away from the important issues the office is tasked with addressing, particularly combatting the historic overdose crisis.

Concerns around Gupta, an ally of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), surfaced even before the White House announced his appointment. As it became clear that he was the leading candidate for the role in early 2021, harm reduction activists and health experts criticized Gupta for not doing enough to prevent the shutdown of a controversial syringe exchange program in West Virginia, warning the White House at the time that they felt he placed politics above preserving the policy. People who worked with Gupta in West Virginia also reached out to Biden officials with warnings about how Gupta mismanaged the office during his tenure leading the state’s Bureau for Public Health, according to a person with direct knowledge of the private conversations.

Manchin’s office did not respond to a POLITICO request for comment. But in a 2021 statement on Gupta’s confirmation, Manchin celebrated Gupta as an “extraordinary West Virginian” and said he had “no doubt” he would be “a dedicated Director of the ONDCP.”

“His work to combat the drug epidemic in a state with the worst overdose rate in the nation, where we lost 1,386 West Virginians to fatal drug-related overdoses last year, makes him well-prepared to lead similar efforts on a national scale,” Manchin said in the statement.

Four of the former ONDCP officials acknowledged that leading the office is a challenging job. The office attracts a mix of career and political staffers who often come at drug policy from competing points of view on how to balance public safety priorities with public health goals. “You can’t put a bow on some of this,” said a third former staffer.

Still, they said Gupta was to blame for the recent departures. And few had any hope that the office could turn things around under his leadership.

“We were hired to do a very specific job that is important to the American people, important to the Biden administration, especially with the Hunter Biden stuff,” said a fourth former official, noting the younger Biden’s struggle with addiction.

“No matter what we did to try to push the real administration agenda, we would get side barred by the political aspirations of the director.”

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Last month, Richard Haass, the former longtime head of the Council on Foreign Relations, approached top officials in the Biden administration, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with an audacious plan for changing the politics around the Israel-Hamas war.

Haass believed that Joe Biden needed to separate himself from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose military campaign was hurting U.S. credibility abroad and the president’s popularity at home. And he proposed that Biden do so by going to Israel to deliver a speech — possibly to the Knesset, the nation’s parliament — where he’d lay out his vision directly to the Israeli people.

Haass, who previously worked in the State Departments for both Bush administrations, had come to the idea after growing increasingly dismayed by Israel’s defiance of Washington’s warnings that its bombardment of Gaza was causing widespread civilian casualties and threatened to destabilize the Middle East. And he first floated it from his perch as a panelist on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the cable news show Biden closely watches.

But by January, Haas was taking his advocacy a step further. Though he did not speak directly to Biden, he did pitch a Knesset-like speech to, among others, Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, according to two people familiar with the discussions but not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

The senior officials reacted coolly to his proposal, according to those two people. A White House official confirmed Thursday that there had been no discussion of scheduling a trip to Israel.

“It’s increasingly clear that the United States does not have a partner with this Israeli prime minister or government. We’re paying a price for that: the president is paying a political price domestically and the U.S. is paying a reputational price in the region and the world,” Haass said in a statement to POLITICO. “A speech over the prime minister’s head would clearly show what the U.S. believes and could lead to a real debate in Israel.”

That Haass, a 72-year-old staid figure of the establishment, felt compelled to push Biden to undertake a high-stakes diplomatic endeavor underscores the frustration the foreign policy community has come to feel about the state of the war. And with Israel moving toward a military operation in the crowded Rafah area of the Gaza Strip that the Biden administration and other allies have warned against, that angst is unlikely to abate anytime soon.

While the administration, at least for now, has opted against a broad show of independence from Netanyahu’s government, it has taken a series of steps to split with the Israeli government and, in some cases, to aid Palestinians.

Over the past few weeks, Biden has started imposing sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He has announced he is temporarily shielding certain Palestinians from deportation given the crisis in Gaza. He has issued a memorandum aimed at enhancing U.S. efforts to monitor whether countries receiving American military aid are violating human rights.

His administration also is ramping up pressure on Israel to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, specifically flour. Top officials were recently dispatched to meet with Arab-American leaders in Michigan, a critical swing state with a large Arab-American population, where they expressed regret for much of the administration’s messaging on the crisis, which seemed to focus more on Israeli victims than Palestinian ones.

The most visible break, however, came last week when Biden deemed the Israeli military’s actions as “over the top.”

Still, the Biden administration’s frustration with Netanyahu is far deeper than anyone has conveyed in public.

Biden had told senior aides and advisers in, at times, colorful language that he frequently finds Netanyahu obstinate and unreasonable, according to three people familiar with the private conversations.

And some Biden administration officials privately wonder if Netanyahu — whose popularity has sunk due to the Hamas attack — sees political opportunity in pressing ahead with the war. The prime minister may also see benefits, especially among far-right Israeli voters, in standing up to the United States, said Gerald Feierstein, a former senior State Department official focused on the Middle East.

The situation, Feierstein said, has clearly left Biden “increasingly fed up.”

“We all know Joe Biden has a temper,” he said. “He’s got his own concerns about his presidential election in a few months. I think that in fact he is increasingly out of patience with Netanyahu, and it is beginning to show.”

White House aides note that, even in the early days of the war, Biden pushed Israel to allow humanitarian aid to Gaza and warned Netanyahu not to make the same mistakes the United States did after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“Since the horrific attacks of October 7th, President Biden has steadfastly supported Israel’s right to defend itself by rooting out Hamas, which continues to pose an existential threat to the Israeli people, while also urging Israel to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties,” said Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the National Security Council. “He has also directed his team from the beginning of the conflict to work to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians who are caught up in this crisis and are also victims of Hamas.”

Frictions could soon come to a boil as Israel plans to stage a ground offensive in the Rafah area of the Gaza strip. The Biden team sees the operation as “a disaster best avoided,” a U.S. official familiar with the situation said.

Biden has warned Netanyahu not to proceed with the offensive without a serious plan to protect civilians, a message he reiterated in a call with the Israeli leader Thursday. But Netanyahu has given no indication that he is reconsidering the operation. Should he ignore the warnings, Biden could look unusually impotent on the world stage.

It would present a major puncture to the U.S.-Israel relationship. But even then U.S. officials are skeptical that Israel would respond to a major rebuke from Washington. Israeli popular opinion is broadly supportive of the war effort, and the country has the weaponry to continue its campaign for a significant amount of time even if the U.S. walks away from it. That, in turn, has put the White House in a political bind back home.

Many progressive Democrats have grown deeply unhappy over the years with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the Israel-Hamas war has severely undercut Biden’s standing among that section of his party. Most Democrats now disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war, including nearly three quarters of Democratic voters ages 18 to 44, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.

“There’s too much of a difference between what they say they’re doing privately and what they are doing publicly,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said of the White House’s approach. She has counseled senior Biden aides to more explicitly break with Netanyahu.

Adam Cancryn contributed reporting.